SOURCE: "The Theme of War in the Works of Gumilev," in Slavic and East-European Journal, Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer, 1977, pp. 204-13.

In the following excerpt, Rusinko characterizes Gumilevs war poems as abstract, heroic and "rhetorical," and compares them to his wartime prose sketches, which she considers more realistic.

Gumilev's poems on the theme of war have been both praised and condemned, but he is generally acknowledged as the outstanding Russian soldier-poet of the Great War. His treatment of this theme, along with his exotic adventure poems, is largely responsible for his subsequent position in the history of Russian poetry as the stereotyped "poet-warrior." Actually, Gumilev's war poems are not numerous. In all, there are only ten poems dealing with the war as the central theme, and it appears peripherally in but a few more. Other poets of the time, notably Sergej Gorodeckij and Georgij Ivanov, produced more war poetry...